COLIFORM BACTERIA CONTAMINATION PROFILING OF RAW MILK CHEESES USING STATISTICAL ASSESSMENT OF TYPE-LINKED CORRELATIONS

In the light of the current trend of increasing consumption of ecological, unprocessed and slow food, hygiene-associated microbiological drawbacks of raw milk cheeses are still an issue. This study was designed for the coliforms contamination assessment of multiple types of raw milk cheeses manufactured by local producers. The paper is focused on searching for possible correlations between the sample type and coliform bacteria contamination, using the chisquared test of significance for statistical processing of the data. The results for a total sample size of 253 cheeses indicated significant associations (p<0.0005) between salting, smoking, milk origin and cheese recipe, on one hand and coliform bacteria contamination on the other hand. No significant association (p=0.438) was found between coliforms and whey-cheese versus milk-cheese classification parameter.